


say, say my name

by 8611



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Science Fiction, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 08:33:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott disconnects with a gasp, his spine arching as Stiles holds his head still, a palm over his forehead as he pulls out his hardline (Matrix!AU).</p>
            </blockquote>





	say, say my name

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in plot: turn back now. 
> 
> The title is from 'Dissolved Girl' by Massive Attack.

(Scott disconnects with a gasp, his spine arching as Stiles holds his head still, a palm over his forehead as he pulls out his hardline.

He rolls onto his side, clutching the edge of the chair and coughing, and blood drips to the floor, leaving perfectly round drops of red against the gunmetal grey. He wipes the heel of his hand across his mouth, and it comes away smeared with blood. 

“Don’t do that again,” Stiles says, and when Scott turns to him he’s got an eyebrow arched and his arms crossed. 

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Scott says, and his voice is raspy. 

“Still,” Stiles says, and he lets his arms fall to his sides, hang there in their too large sleeves. Scott licks his lips, tastes blood, and offers Stiles a weak smile.)

\---

Stiles would love to say that he can still dream, but he can’t. He’s not sure why. 

“Stop thinking so loud,” Derek says, his voice a low rumble across Stiles’ skin from where his face is pressed to Stiles’ bare hip. He snakes an arm over Stiles’ lap, pulls him as close as he can, and drags his teeth over Stiles’ skin. It makes him shiver, and he hunches over, twisting a hand into Derek’s hair. 

“Do you dream?” Stiles says. Derek stills and props himself up on his elbow. His hair is getting long, and he’s got it out of its tie-back, tucked behind his ears. 

“Yeah,” Derek says. “You do too. You talk sometimes.”

Stiles stills his hand. 

“I thought I didn’t anymore.”

“You just don’t remember them.” 

“I wish I could,” Stiles murmurs, and Derek presses a fierce kiss to Stiles’ side, moves up and across his side. He plants a hand on the mattress and wraps the other around the back of Stiles’ neck, over some of his scars. 

“I’d trade, if we could,” Derek says, and before Stiles can answer, Derek kisses him. Stiles sighs against his lips and runs his hands over Derek’s skin, soaking up the warmth. 

\---

Scott doesn’t mean to keep doing this. It’s not something he’d like to find. Glitches hurt, especially when you walk head first into them. 

“Scott?” He can hear Stiles somewhere behind him, his footsteps and his voice. 

He tries to answer, but he’s frozen in space, feet off the ground, mid jump over a spread of broken glass. The glass has started to rise up, glinting in the air around him. 

He’s drawn to glitches, somehow. He’s never known how. 

“McCall,” someone else says, the sound ghosting against the walls. He doesn’t know the voice. “McCall, it’s time to move.”

A woman appears in front of him, porcelain skin and night hair, and smiles at him, a hunting bow raised in her hands. He watches as her draw hand loosens, watches as the arrow leaves the bow. He has to move. He’s not scared, it’s not a frantic realization – it’s just something he knows, solid and steadfast. 

He’s not sure how he does it, but he breaks the glitch. He flips back as the glass shatters against the ground, and when he catches himself on his palms the glass slices through his skin. 

When he lands on his feet the woman is gone, and Stiles is racing around the corner. 

“Wait!” Scott throws up a hand, and Stiles skids to a stop, chest heaving. “Glitch.”

Stiles looks at the broken glass and frowns. 

“I can’t believe you found another,” Stiles mutters, rolls his eyes. 

“Maybe it’s my superpower,” Scott says. 

When Scott goes to find another way around, he finds an arrow embedded in the far wall. 

\---

Stiles sits with Cora, his feet up on one of her monitors. She keeps shooting him dirty looks, but he ignores them. He knows that if he puts weight on one corner of the monitor the static in it dies down a bit. 

“What’s going on?” Stiles asks, tipping back in his chair and staring at the expanse of cording and duct work above their heads that forms their own version of the night sky, status LEDs tangled up in it all. 

“You need to learn to read code,” Cora grouses. 

“It’s not code,” Stiles says, because Stiles knows code. It’s what he does. “It’s magical binary. You’d know, if you ever learned to _actually_ code.”

Cora sighs and rolls her eyes. They’ve had this conversation a lot. 

“Sorry I’m not a redpill,” Cora says. “Damn my wholly real and uncontrolled life.” 

“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

They sit in silence for a while, long enough that Stiles grabs a rubber band ball off the floor and tosses it into the air, up and down, over and over. Periodically, Cora will make a little noise of judgment at something that’s gone on in the rain of code. The monitors make her skin glow an unnatural white-green color in the dim light.

“Shit,” Cora breathes, snapping her mouthpiece down off the top of her headset. Stiles sits upright, watches with wide eyes as Cora stares straight ahead. He knows what she’s hearing, counts the rings in his head. Prays that Scott picks up. “Scott, get out of there.”

“What is it?” Stiles asks, puts his feet firmly on the ground. 

“No, you need to. There’s an agent program just – Scott? Scott?” Cora sounds frantic.

“Did you just lose him?” Stiles asks as Cora growls, lurching towards one of her keyboards. 

“Go get ready to unplug,” Cora says, fingers flying, and Stiles does as he’s told, throwing himself down the curved hall, away from the mainframe. 

Lydia and Scott are plugged in, although as Stiles skids to a halt between them Lydia’s eyes flutter open, her hand already going for her own hardline. She sits up with shaking hands, her breathing heavy. 

“What just happened?” Stiles asks. 

“Agent,” Lydia says, and they both turn towards Scott. 

Stiles can’t lose him. That’s not an option. 

\---

“A bow’s not a very effective weapon,” Scott says, inspecting the arrow the woman had just fired and he had caught. It had been like the first time, like time was slowing down, although he wasn’t glitched this time. 

“It’s fine,” the woman says, and lowers it. “Most people can’t catch arrows.”

“Their loss,” Scott says, pressing his thumb to the point, almost hard enough to draw blood. When he looks back up, the woman is looking at him strangely. 

“You’re unique,” she says, walks towards him. “Do you know that?”

“No?” Scott says, taken aback. “I mean, I don’t – I’m not.”

“You are, Scott McCall,” she says. “When everything happens, you should know that.”

“When what happens?”

“There’s a revolution coming.”

There is a phone ringing somewhere. Scott looks towards the sound, briefly. When he looks back the woman is gone. Before he can react something comes at him out of the dark. 

Another arrow. It slams into one of his shoulders, his hand already on the shaft. He gasps, surprised at the sudden pain. When he looks at the arrow, this one is pure silver, shaft and point. The phone is still ringing.

_You should get that_ , the walls ghost at him, and he does, an even run through the building, automatically knowing his way, even though there are sunspikes of pain his chest and blood in his wake. 

\---

“Don’t do that again,” Stiles tells him, and he tries to hide the storm in his mind. 

He tries to ignore the way that Scott clutches at his shoulder over dinner, rolling it out periodically. 

When he goes to get a book from the mainframe that night he hears Cora and Scott talking, their voices low. It’s a rough tumble of words until he gets close to them, close enough that he feels guilty. 

“The arrow was different, it was… silver, I guess? Solid. It was heavy.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath, and when Cora speaks again, her words are rushed. 

“She’s an argent program. They’re not supposed to be real.”

“She was very real.”

“The next time you see her, you run. They’re next gen AI, and they _will_ kill you.”

Stiles bites his lip, slips away. He can’t think about Scott being anything besides living and breathing, skin and bone and _blood_. Scott’s one of the few things he has left. 

Derek is doing sit-ups in the middle of the floor of their cabin, although he stills when Stiles comes in, his hands locked behind his head. 

“This would be a lot easier if none of us were redpills,” Stiles says, and then frowns. That wasn’t exactly what he wanted to say. Derek frowns, rolling up onto an elbow. 

“You guys are more important than we are,” Derek says. Stiles comes to stand over him, glares down at him, one foot on either side of his hips. 

“That is total bullshit,” Stiles says. 

“We’re not good for much,” Derek points out, and Stiles doesn’t miss the way he runs a hand through his hair, past where his mainline plug would be if he wasn’t a natural. 

“Such _utter_ bullshit,” Stiles says, and drops to his knees and his hands, and Derek rises up to meet him. 

“Same to you,” Derek breathes, and anchors a hand over Stiles’ mainline, holding them together. 

\---

Lydia goes with him, even though they shouldn’t be doing this. He just needs to know more.

“Thanks,” he says as he finishes the input sequence, brushing the con panel away and slipping into one of the chairs. 

“I’m not letting you get yourself killed on my watch,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes as she sits down next to him.

Scott grins at the ceiling as he reaches for his mainline, his eyes slipping closed. 

When he opens them they’re standing in the front room of an old house in the forest, and there is afternoon light coming in through the windows, filtered through the lace curtains. 

When they step outside there are leaves underfoot and a breeze in the air, and they stand on the grand old front porch and stare into the bare trees. 

“This was an important place, once,” a voice says from the other end of the porch, and when they turn towards it, the woman is back, sitting on the railing. The peeling paint stands out against her crisp, black clothes. 

“Do you get off on speaking like some kind of junked up oracle?” Lydia asks, her hands on her hips, and the woman smiles. 

“I did know one, once,” she says, and hops to the ground, heading their way. “Still haven’t figured out what you are, have you?”

“Pretty sure I’m human,” Scott says. 

“That’s true,” the woman says. “That’s always been true. But you should know there’s something more.”

She leaves them in the swirling leaves, and Scott realizes, with sudden aching clarity, that he would love to know her name. 

\---

“I think that agent might have been right,” Lydia says one night, when she and Stiles are sitting with Cora and her monitors. 

“About what?” Cora asks. 

“About that whole revolution thing,” Lydia says. “There’s been chatter about growing machine presence. Ships have been getting called back to Zion.” 

“We haven’t,” Cora says, shrugging. 

“Yet,” Lydia points out. 

Stiles gets up eventually, after Lydia has been scooting closer and closer to Cora, and he catches a glimpse of Lydia straddling Cora’s lap from the other side of the monitors as he leaves. The glow of the screens catches Lydia’s fire hair and rough spun dress. 

Scott is in the mess, staring at the top of a tin. Stiles sits next to him, bracing his arms on the table and looking down at the circle of metal. 

“Very interesting,” Stiles says, nodding in mock formality at the top, and Scott breaks into a grin. 

“Sorry, I just… I’m pretty sure something’s wrong with me.”

Stiles swears his heart skips a beat. 

“Wrong how?” He asks. A million disastrous ideas and possibilities play out in his mind in the span of that single, stuttering heartbeat. 

“This,” Scott says, and reaches for the tin. He holds his hand a few inches from it, and then, looking like he’s trying to move heaven and earth, slowly raises his hand. 

The top comes with it. Stiles stops breathing. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s not wrong and all right,” he says finally, breathless. When Scott turns towards him, sweat on his brow, he’s grinning sheepishly. 

\---

The last thing Scott sees before they’re plugging in is Derek kissing Stiles, something long and lingering, 

The first thing he sees when they connect is an empty street in the middle of a city. The only light is from the streetlights, and Scott wonders if it would be eerie if it wasn’t for Stiles and Lydia at his back. They stand in a circle, facing out, and stare up at the buildings. 

“Things are shutting down,” Scott says. He’s never seen the Matrix like this, totally devoid of life. 

“Well then,” Lydia says, tugging on one of her gloves and making a fist. “Time for us to get to work.” 

Scott feels it before he sees or hears it, like something tugging at the back of his mind. He turns so that he’s facing down the street, and walks between Lydia and Stiles, towards the arrow that’s flying towards him. 

When he catches it, he stops it inches from his face. It’s another silver one. 

“Are you ever going to greet me like a normal person?” He laughs, and the woman steps out from an alley, into a pool of light from one of the street lamps.

“I’m not a normal person,” she points out. 

“You’re not a normal program either,” Scott says, and she smiles. 

“No, I guess not.” 

Lydia and Stiles join them, and she nods to them. 

“Are you here to be riddletastic, or are you actually going to help stop the end of the world?” Lydia asks. 

“Cause we’re kind of here to stop the end of the world,” Stiles says. 

“You’re here to start a revolution,” the woman says, and a silver bow and arrow appear in her hands. “I’m here to help with that.”

“Can we get her talking like a real person?” Stiles asks. “Cora probably has a bug fix for that.” 

“Not a real person,” Scott says, smiling. When she smiles back the lights around them flicker, overloading. 

“I’ve got someone for you to meet,” the woman says, and leads them off. 

As they walk she takes her second arrow back from Scott, holding them crossed in one hand. 

“Do you remember the very first thing I told you, Scott McCall?” She asks, holding up the arrows. 

“Time to move,” Scott says. He can hear footsteps and cars in the distance, can feel an army bearing down on their backs. The woman turns, an arrow already nocked. 

“Indeed it is,” she says, and lets the arrow loose. As it flies down the street the streetlights go out in its wake, and Scott raises a hand, guiding it. As the first agent walks into the last of the light, the arrow strikes him in the forehead, silver through artificial skin. 

Scott reaches out for her in the darkness, and as he puts a hand on her shoulder she answers his question. 

“My name is Allison.”

There is warmth in his hands, and he raises them to guide another arrow.


End file.
